Here's what happens to cause the decrease in demand for a utility. It happens quite often, seemingly.
1) Utility (water, sewage, gas, power) is cheap, available, and highly consumed. 2) Public service announcement goes out saying "please conserve!" 3) People who already do not carefully conserve their utilities (due to excess cash) respond and do their civic duty, throttling their use. 4) Utility company (whether public or private) realizes "hey, people are using less, but we're getting less revenue as a result, too". 5) Due to the need to maintain a certain level of infrastructure to make the utilities available, rates must be increased to pay for costs. (A healthy profit is retained as well, of course.) Certainly, the added cost of operating their facilities at reduced efficiency has something to do with things as well. 6) People are suddenly paying the same amount as before for the utility, but using less.
I'm sure less power use is partially impacted by more efficient electronics, to be sure. The demand for those more efficient electronics is largely driven, however, by increased utility costs.
What I have to ask is: how is this going to impact the economy? My guess is "poorly". Energy rates in California, where this seems a common practice, are significantly higher than elsewhere in the US. This makes the base level of business operation markedly more expensive: you've got to pay your employees more, you've got to pay more for daily operations energy, and everyone else does as well.
No promises, but I'm guessing this has something to do with the number of platters in the drive. A 3TB drive with 3 1TB platters is obviously going to have a lower MTBF because it has 3 times as many heads, spindles, etc. which can break or have failures.
The 1TB drive, on the other hand, has a single 1TB spindle.
I've used the same keyboard for the better part of 10 years, and just now replaced my 3rd Logitech mouse. There was nothing wrong with them. Why replace them?
It'll be some now (months) before the changes make it into distros. The hardware will continue to run the software it's running now. You don't have to move from Debian 6, which is already pushing the general capabilities of hardware which might have these cards, in the first place.
I mean, shit man. Do you want to play the latest 3D game on a 10-year-old 3dfx card? Where are you going to even find IDE drives that will work with such systems?
This is the same reason Verizon still exists and, until recently, why people put up with sub-par phones. Simply put, the phones were cheap or free, and people put up with the higher usage costs (say, akin to fewer apps/less usability) because of the diminished up-front cost.
If tablets were to segment as PCs did in the early 90s and offer "cheap" variants (eg. a tablet with 4G of storage and half as much RAM, maybe), maybe with cheaper displays, they would be adopted quite quickly, I think.
But even if you HAVE cheap broadband, there are always questions like data security. (Say your cloud provider goes out of business. What guarantee do you have they'll really wipe all the hard drives and backups holding your data when they liquidate all their equipment?)
FUCK the "will my data be unavailable to others" perspective. Even if the drives aren't wiped, the problem is negligible compared to the data potentially not being available to you".
Look, half the appeal to the "Cloud" is not having to worry about the software upgrades, the hardware maintanance, and IT staff. In all probability, on the exclusion of IT staff, it also means that you won't have a usable local backup of the data on the cloud, either. Many, many of these "online cloud services" do not actually provide you with
For instance, take a product our company uses (despite the protests of myself and multiple others). I won't name them specifically, but their product is for task scheduling, ticketing, and billing integration and, supposedly, integrates with a so-called KnowledgeBase which isn't even a well implemented steaming pile of crap. Their product does not offer you your data in a useeble format. They will provide you a raw export of precisely what you entered, and nothing more. The reports, etc. that you had generated? Gone. All the business logic you created? Gone. Granted, this is worst case scenario, but if this company were to go out of business, you're in all likelihood fucked. Even if you want to stop using their service, you're only going to get a useless raw dump of the database.
While there are many cloud services to which this doesn't apply, the backup situation most certainly does for many of them. This is, IMO, just as much if not more of a problem than the "not enough bandwidth" issue.
As for your "either/or" scenario involving paying skilled computer workers or hiring IT, there's a 3rd option. Have IT do anything remotely computer related for the staff and work them to death. This happens quite often, and usually leads to the desire to outsource in the first place ("IT isn't doing their job, let's put it on the cloud"). That ends poorly.
Wrong. Apple did no such thing. CUPS has been around as open source since 1997 - the GPL, to be precise:
Michael Sweet, who owns Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997. The first public betas appeared in 1999.[3] The original design of CUPS used the LPD protocol, but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for several Linux distributions, including Red Hat Linux.[citation needed] In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[4] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[5]
And you seem to be implying that Apple open sourced Webkit, etc. (BSD? anything else you'd like to make wild claims about?) as well? Bull fucking shit. Webkit originated in KDE (more or less, it may have heritage beyond that). OpenCL is indeed Apple, but it's not open source, either.
Did Apple make Samba, Apache, and Postscript, too? (The answer is no.) Apple is no "proponent" of "open source"; they're a proponent of free software. There is a huge, huge difference, particularly when they are the sole financial benefactor involved.
I'm so sick and tired of Apple fanboys saying "it was done on the mac, first!" when the reality is often quite different. Apple gets credit for improving upon CUPS, sure. But not much beyond that (and even that is tenuous to argue).
Increasingly, IT has been moved from "enablers of capability" to "untrustworthy and ineffectual geeks in a closet". It's been going this way for years, and the trend is clear.
This article just lays it out in a fairly unclear, rambling fashion. The concept held for IT is pretty clear, none the less.
Who's to blame? Personally, I put it on IT and application consulting firms who back their pretty weasel words with... more weasel words. They promise the sky, and due to the timeframes involved and the complexity and scope of the projects, tend to make off like bandits. They do a 90% implementation of 80% of the problem and consider it a success. "Computer people" end up looking poorly. Naturally, it falls on the shoulders of the "computer people" left to maintain systems, "IT". IT gets the blunt of it, and the scope and number of problems often faced by IT is neither seen or understood by those around them. We're left to clean up the problems of myriads of programmers, poor business decisions, and reckless users. The appreciation we get for this is unreasonable expectations and short responses. (Where did they get the expectation that these things should "just work", as evidenced by their short responses and irritability, I wonder? Certainly not from experience, because it's never really been that way.)
By all means, make the applications simpler and remove user control. This reduces functionality, eliminating risk. The tradeoff is that the users (already encumbered by limited intelligence, judgement, or otherwise in many cases) have limited utility in their applications. For most, this is fine. Bumble on through the work day!
I've seen this reoccurring problem in a half dozen major industries in the last decade. People do not treat their mailman or their plumber with such rudeness. They don't treat the guy coming to redo their household wiring this way. Why, in a prefessional capacity, do they treat their IT people this way? We're required to have personalities which programmers are not, yet have to have a much broader skill base to be successful than a typical programmer (scripting? misc. esoteric systems? Unix and Linux - and Windows? TCP and WPF? Sockets and pipes?). Yet we're allotted a lot less esteem or regard as people.
Time for a 'career change', I think. But: where to? That's what I want to know. Where does the technically adept, intellectually curious (and, currently, fairly drunk) person go?
Just don't sign it. Put it under your desk, in the waste bin, or something. (Granted I've only been able to do so thus far because of the smaller organization's I've worked for.)
Or better yet, sign it, but with your marked, initialed, and dated modifications more to your own pleasing.
One has to consider, then, why "blacks" aren't as 'smart' as whites or Asians, now, then. (I'm basing the fact that, well, they never actually left Africa, they're in Africa, not many significant cultures have come from Africa, blacks typically test lower on IQ tests despite socioeconomic adjustment, etc.)
What happened? You'd think the resulting half-breeds (us modern whites) would be less smart than blacks due to breeding with the stupid neanderthals.
Or, maybe your presumption that the Neanderthals were stupid is false. Though I suppose it could've been that all the bright black ancestors left Africa at the time (albeit, unlikely).
What's-likely-to-get-me-labeled-racist aside, I'd thought it was fairly well known that Neanderthals had larger brain capacity/skulls than us modern humans. I've attributed it to them actually being more intelligent, though likely lacking in some sort of physical fashion (high protein requirements, enjoyed fucking too much, lazy, physically slow, too peaceful, lacked motivation, whatever).
You get about 41mpg per US gallon, then, it looks like. Here I was thinking there was a drastic difference between your vehicles and our's, for a moment.:)
No, it wouldn't. Steel is the best material. The problem is materials and engineering.
Dents, dings, road impact, and yes, accidents will kill most vehicles before the engine goes kaput. Shocks, struts, etc. are/were engineered for certain use thresholds, which coincidentally tend to fail right around the same time. (The alternative is a much simpler, or much more expensive vehicle. I'd be OK with either, if it meant they actually lasted.)
This seems less true for vehicles made in the 80s, prior to the major change in manufacturing approaches in the automotive industry. Say what you will about independent frames (where the body sits on the vehicle frame) regarding occupant accident survival rates, but with the current lot of vehicles (where the frame is integral to the body), it takes only the smallest of fender bender to twist the frame and otherwise cause the vehicle to be a write-off. I've seen multiple newer 'safe' vehicles (both large and small) absolutely totaled (ie not drivable, not repairable) from the smallest of accidents, where an independent frame would've saved the vehicle and still not harmed the person(s) involved. (It's no wonder comprehensive automotive insurance costs so much these days.) You can get an 80s vehicle almost completely rebuilt for what it'd cost to straighten the frame and do minor 'body' repairs to a modern car. No thanks.
Oh yeah, due to the fact that the frame isn't the body, these older designs are more resilient to rust. The important parts are thicker and sturdier, instead of distributed throughout the body. Result? Rust-out won't make your vehicle unsafe except in the more extreme scenarios.
This problem is not just present in these two domains. You see this dichotomy elsewhere, specifically in IT.
I do IT in a scientific research-oriented organization, having taken over for previous staff members who were very much of the "IT should be done like research" school of thought. The result was that each problem was addressed quickly and without any consideration for the whole. Being as they were working with physical assets and not just software (though there was a lot of that, too), the end result is similar to a large, monolithic application with plenty of places where it can break, being almost completely unmaintainable in its current incarnation without a complete overhaul.
I consider them to sysadmin like programmers. From my experience with the programmers I've worked with (people who are self-ascribed programmers, both good and bad at their job), the quick fix or solution is the most desired result. Documentation? What's that? Don't do something elegant and atomic, looking at the larger picture: kludge it to work with what's there currently pull from misc. other things you're aware of, etc. since you built the original and are aware of its intricacies. (Again, by no means document these inter-relationships, why they're important, and what something disappearing might do somewhere else. Don't use common topology/framework practices for your designs/implementations, just make a giant fucking spider web. Don't, by any means, be consistent. "Ship it, it's done".)
I've seen the same thing in IT as a whole. There are entirely too many 'administrators' who are basically glorified technicians who make well above their performance grade. They are negligent in their responsibilities to plan roll-outs. No, a "complete rebuild and reorganization, trash the original' is no more a viable option in most cases than "a complete rewrite" is due to the time (and money) it'd take to do so.
out of curiosity, how many miles do you drive daily to get to work?
I live 'close' to work over here in the us. sanfrancisco area along a Bart line, which supposedly is good public transit. short of cycling a very steep hill to get to work, taking Bart and a bus (and taking an extra hour or two both ways) I'm stuck driving.
that's a a couple hundred a month in fuel. not cheap. (your fuel would be cheaper still if you weren't paying more in tax than for fuel. I'm not sure why cheap fuel is seen as a bad thing. its not green? fuck that. its a sign of affluence and economic potential.
my understanding of the soot is that its caused by an incorrect air/fuel mix. except at start I don't have that problem in my old non-turbo 6.2 Detroit engine.
another downside of modern diesels is that the engine will outlive the vehicle by a substantial margin. 200k is nothing for a diesel. gas engines start to give up the ghost before that.
at this point, fuel cost and availability are going to hold back serious adoption. ignoring how much cleaner even old diesel vehicles are than gas (due to fuel lifecycle pollution and ecological impact), uls diesel and the like now costs more than gas by quite a bit. diesel torque with marginally better MPG isn't going to make that all that appealing to most.
I'm sorry, but the kind of game I enjoy starts at 10 hours. KotOR and derivatives, Max Payne (which is actually more of a 5 hour game, and on the short side, but it made up for it by being awesome), Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Warcraft 2... the list goes on. Short story games are a huge disappointment if there's any story to speak of at all. You haven't got the time to develop anything meaningful.
What's next, NYT bestseller's list having Peanuts and Garfield?
Personally, I'm going to pick up these two OP games. I've not heard of them (kinda too busy to pay much attention) and I'm tired of crap games. Hell, even Deus Ex 3, which claims to hail back to the original, has been "consoled", and looks like it's going to suck on the "depth of story" department.
Except the Bay Area is also the most socially liberal and philanthropic regions of the country.
What?
Socially liberal, I get. I have met very, very few non-religious 'social liberals' who are philanthropic, unless we're talking about "I support taking money from the public coffers and giving it to others".
But that's largely besides the point. The Bay Area, like almost no other part of the US, is incredibly myopically focused. The Bay, one of the richest regions of the world, is the center of the world. All that sits outside its cultural realm are where the barbarians live. As someone who has lived throughout the US, nowhere have I found such a high majority of natives who are ignorant of "elsewhere", despite so many being implants from other parts of the country and world. (As a newcomer, it's somewhat odd to be looked at with disbelief and/or disdain when you're not aware of where a specific local landmark or roadway is. You'd not get that in BFE, Nebraska.)
As for "helping people out of their hardship"... I don't see how the farmer in Iowa who's lost his crops due to flooding is going to be helped by a tech boom, other than the welfare check that pays for him to not work after he's lost his farm (or pays him to not work the land, once it recovers, by overpaying him). I don't see how the tech worker in New York or Georgia benefits by some asshole deciding "we'll make more profit by sending this work to India" (ultimately assisting in the company's demise, thankfully). That's what we term a short term gain. It hurts everyone, long term.
A while back I had the idea that a sequel with Campbell would be pretty cool if they did it as him being "happy, married, etc." in a middle-class neighborhood and having the undead come to our Earth. You'd have a lot of opportunity for more complex satirical humour.
I doubt they'll do that, but it'd be fucking awesome.
Wow, that scenario is surprisingly similar to an environment I got out of a couple months ago, except about half the servers were virtual hosts, running multiple server instances, and I had to contend with a great deal of boss "hey, I know you're busy, but spend 20 minutes looking at this little problem for me because i can't figure it out" (which was ultimately 1-2 hours a day).
Except, I asked for management to keep their word from my initial hiring and to meet my initial pay requirements. Instead, I got a 2% increase and what amounted to "you're lucky you're getting any at all, here are the projects you're not getting done, and this is what we need done by the end of a month".
So I gave myself walking orders, but not before a large degree of employer hostility for said fact. They still haven't hired a replacement, and I know their remaining competent, non-neurotic asset is thinking of walking as well, soon to leave them as a shell support and marketing company. I'm making three times as much now, with substantially better benefits and a better boss (I'm making the calls), getting things done, and generally enjoying myself.
Don't sell yourself short in those situations. If you're good and know it, and getting stepped on, get out.
That's great, and mostly true in most instances, except for this: your elimination results in the failure (or absence) of a single point of failure.
Sure, in some organizations, you may be able to hide the fact your key IT is gone for a while. But from what I've seen, those "single points of failure" are IT types who's failure is largely that they're trying to head off a REALLY REALLY BIG failure, and sacrificing day-in-day-out type "administration" tasks. Most organizations are going to start suffering immediately from such a failure, so your value is fairly high in simply a "able to get shit done, or show it's being worked on".
No reasonable sane "IT Manager" is going to fire their sole source of resolution (which would make them look bad one way or another) without someone waiting in the wings. If you're paying attention (job postings, headhunters, etc.) you'll see this coming.
Chances are, most functional organizations under 400 hundred people have only one or MAYBE two people who can effectively troubleshoot a bad outage. Sure, they may have an IT staff of 3, 4, 5, 10... but chances are, they're not of the 'sysadmin' type. They're frontline support, most likely, and deal mostly with Windows workstations and servers. For any crucial role, there is no more than one capable person on hand in most IT organizations. The pay masters wouldn't hear of duplicated functionality (that's inefficient!).
After all, if something in IT breaks, the worst management sees that can happen (unlike a dead body from neglegence/overworking your staff) is for there to be a fired employee. They don't see the big picture.
Sure, it's nice to feel needed. It's job security. But it's better to be needed and have someone else who can help pull the weight while you're sitting on a beach with a drink in hand, live a little longer, and have your resume ready to go. Being unemployed for a long period of time isn't half as bad as month after month of high-stress environments where you're pressed with "fix it now under pressure" or "I'm completely burnt out and can't maintain this level of service".
The big things of interest for OS X to me, as someone who likes efficiency and stability out of his systems, are:
* will they finally fix the horrible threading and context switching implementation so that running something like a spreadsheet program with a large spreadsheet not cause the gnashing of teeth? (This has been a problem since the beginning of 10.x, but I started notcing it around 10.4 with the Intel macs and able to compare apples to apples - ie linux or Windows on the same hardware). * HFS+ replacement so IO won't be a horrendous bottleneck? * Better wifi implementation so that the macs I've got to deal with are not the main ones to have signal issues? (Seriously, when macs have more issues with APs than XP, you know you've got issue. You can't completely say it's the hardware, because Linux on the same systems is at least better...) * will they allow me to do what I want with the 'dock' and the sparse UI elements, or am I restricted to using it how they say I should (particularly as it pertains to multitasking/not multitasking: it doesn't matter if they make that not suck at the techincal level if the UI is still horribly crippled).
I think the internships most people get probably suck. They aren't like what you experienced, working for free. That's something else. What we're largely talking about are internships where people aren't paid, and in addition to that, are likely one of many differently skilled people doing menial grunt labor jobs not that different than the relatively skilled people working at similar jobs in places like India.
Granted, completely unpaid internships push the bar of sanity even further than simply a low-pay internship of this nature.
I will have to agree with you on the merit of no-pay work, though. I've done it, and while I didn't reap the benefits you did, it did provide me with experience. In the grand scheme of things, I'd argue that low-pay work (eg. minimum wage or close to it) is probably not all that far off the mark, though it at least demonstrates that the employer has an interest in your time as a quantifiable entity and not just free labor. (Unpaid IT internships are borderline insane, IMO. If you're in IT, don't fall for it - there's more than enough paid internship (or similar) work out there that you shouldn't have such a problem.)
Personally, the interns I've got are invaluable and it will likely result in at least one permanent job offer down the line. Someone I'd consider a good friend at this point was initially hired as an intern, and it resulted in a permanent position for him as well (he is now working very closely with me in a quasi-management and planning capacity). Starting as an intern, for the right company, at the right time, can be very valuable to everyone involved. (It just isn't that common.)
Probably for the same reason that "random guys" get shit posted to slashdot all the time?
Historically, most of the cool shit on slashdot, as well as the not-cool-but-socially-pertinent stuff, has been 'small fry' stuff. It's why the so-called Slashdot Effect is pertinent in the first place. If something isn't relatively obscure, then it really doesn't belong on a site that's "news for nerds" does it?
Would you rather have nothing but John Dvorak and pcmag.com type posts, like every other link aggregator out there? IMO, bring on the random 'blog' posts. I'm tired of monotony on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what happens to cause the decrease in demand for a utility. It happens quite often, seemingly.
1) Utility (water, sewage, gas, power) is cheap, available, and highly consumed.
2) Public service announcement goes out saying "please conserve!"
3) People who already do not carefully conserve their utilities (due to excess cash) respond and do their civic duty, throttling their use.
4) Utility company (whether public or private) realizes "hey, people are using less, but we're getting less revenue as a result, too".
5) Due to the need to maintain a certain level of infrastructure to make the utilities available, rates must be increased to pay for costs. (A healthy profit is retained as well, of course.) Certainly, the added cost of operating their facilities at reduced efficiency has something to do with things as well.
6) People are suddenly paying the same amount as before for the utility, but using less.
I'm sure less power use is partially impacted by more efficient electronics, to be sure. The demand for those more efficient electronics is largely driven, however, by increased utility costs.
What I have to ask is: how is this going to impact the economy? My guess is "poorly". Energy rates in California, where this seems a common practice, are significantly higher than elsewhere in the US. This makes the base level of business operation markedly more expensive: you've got to pay your employees more, you've got to pay more for daily operations energy, and everyone else does as well.
No promises, but I'm guessing this has something to do with the number of platters in the drive. A 3TB drive with 3 1TB platters is obviously going to have a lower MTBF because it has 3 times as many heads, spindles, etc. which can break or have failures.
The 1TB drive, on the other hand, has a single 1TB spindle.
I've used the same keyboard for the better part of 10 years, and just now replaced my 3rd Logitech mouse. There was nothing wrong with them. Why replace them?
It'll be some now (months) before the changes make it into distros. The hardware will continue to run the software it's running now. You don't have to move from Debian 6, which is already pushing the general capabilities of hardware which might have these cards, in the first place.
I mean, shit man. Do you want to play the latest 3D game on a 10-year-old 3dfx card? Where are you going to even find IDE drives that will work with such systems?
This is the same reason Verizon still exists and, until recently, why people put up with sub-par phones. Simply put, the phones were cheap or free, and people put up with the higher usage costs (say, akin to fewer apps/less usability) because of the diminished up-front cost.
If tablets were to segment as PCs did in the early 90s and offer "cheap" variants (eg. a tablet with 4G of storage and half as much RAM, maybe), maybe with cheaper displays, they would be adopted quite quickly, I think.
But even if you HAVE cheap broadband, there are always questions like data security. (Say your cloud provider goes out of business. What guarantee do you have they'll really wipe all the hard drives and backups holding your data when they liquidate all their equipment?)
FUCK the "will my data be unavailable to others" perspective. Even if the drives aren't wiped, the problem is negligible compared to the data potentially not being available to you".
Look, half the appeal to the "Cloud" is not having to worry about the software upgrades, the hardware maintanance, and IT staff. In all probability, on the exclusion of IT staff, it also means that you won't have a usable local backup of the data on the cloud, either. Many, many of these "online cloud services" do not actually provide you with
For instance, take a product our company uses (despite the protests of myself and multiple others). I won't name them specifically, but their product is for task scheduling, ticketing, and billing integration and, supposedly, integrates with a so-called KnowledgeBase which isn't even a well implemented steaming pile of crap. Their product does not offer you your data in a useeble format. They will provide you a raw export of precisely what you entered, and nothing more. The reports, etc. that you had generated? Gone. All the business logic you created? Gone. Granted, this is worst case scenario, but if this company were to go out of business, you're in all likelihood fucked. Even if you want to stop using their service, you're only going to get a useless raw dump of the database.
While there are many cloud services to which this doesn't apply, the backup situation most certainly does for many of them. This is, IMO, just as much if not more of a problem than the "not enough bandwidth" issue.
As for your "either/or" scenario involving paying skilled computer workers or hiring IT, there's a 3rd option. Have IT do anything remotely computer related for the staff and work them to death. This happens quite often, and usually leads to the desire to outsource in the first place ("IT isn't doing their job, let's put it on the cloud"). That ends poorly.
Wrong. Apple did no such thing. CUPS has been around as open source since 1997 - the GPL, to be precise:
Michael Sweet, who owns Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997. The first public betas appeared in 1999.[3] The original design of CUPS used the LPD protocol, but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for several Linux distributions, including Red Hat Linux.[citation needed] In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[4] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[5]
And you seem to be implying that Apple open sourced Webkit, etc. (BSD? anything else you'd like to make wild claims about?) as well? Bull fucking shit. Webkit originated in KDE (more or less, it may have heritage beyond that). OpenCL is indeed Apple, but it's not open source, either.
Did Apple make Samba, Apache, and Postscript, too? (The answer is no.) Apple is no "proponent" of "open source"; they're a proponent of free software. There is a huge, huge difference, particularly when they are the sole financial benefactor involved.
I'm so sick and tired of Apple fanboys saying "it was done on the mac, first!" when the reality is often quite different. Apple gets credit for improving upon CUPS, sure. But not much beyond that (and even that is tenuous to argue).
Increasingly, IT has been moved from "enablers of capability" to "untrustworthy and ineffectual geeks in a closet". It's been going this way for years, and the trend is clear.
This article just lays it out in a fairly unclear, rambling fashion. The concept held for IT is pretty clear, none the less.
Who's to blame? Personally, I put it on IT and application consulting firms who back their pretty weasel words with... more weasel words. They promise the sky, and due to the timeframes involved and the complexity and scope of the projects, tend to make off like bandits. They do a 90% implementation of 80% of the problem and consider it a success. "Computer people" end up looking poorly. Naturally, it falls on the shoulders of the "computer people" left to maintain systems, "IT". IT gets the blunt of it, and the scope and number of problems often faced by IT is neither seen or understood by those around them. We're left to clean up the problems of myriads of programmers, poor business decisions, and reckless users. The appreciation we get for this is unreasonable expectations and short responses. (Where did they get the expectation that these things should "just work", as evidenced by their short responses and irritability, I wonder? Certainly not from experience, because it's never really been that way.)
By all means, make the applications simpler and remove user control. This reduces functionality, eliminating risk. The tradeoff is that the users (already encumbered by limited intelligence, judgement, or otherwise in many cases) have limited utility in their applications. For most, this is fine. Bumble on through the work day!
I've seen this reoccurring problem in a half dozen major industries in the last decade. People do not treat their mailman or their plumber with such rudeness. They don't treat the guy coming to redo their household wiring this way. Why, in a prefessional capacity, do they treat their IT people this way? We're required to have personalities which programmers are not, yet have to have a much broader skill base to be successful than a typical programmer (scripting? misc. esoteric systems? Unix and Linux - and Windows? TCP and WPF? Sockets and pipes?). Yet we're allotted a lot less esteem or regard as people.
Time for a 'career change', I think. But: where to? That's what I want to know. Where does the technically adept, intellectually curious (and, currently, fairly drunk) person go?
Really? Why bother?
Just don't sign it. Put it under your desk, in the waste bin, or something. (Granted I've only been able to do so thus far because of the smaller organization's I've worked for.)
Or better yet, sign it, but with your marked, initialed, and dated modifications more to your own pleasing.
One has to consider, then, why "blacks" aren't as 'smart' as whites or Asians, now, then. (I'm basing the fact that, well, they never actually left Africa, they're in Africa, not many significant cultures have come from Africa, blacks typically test lower on IQ tests despite socioeconomic adjustment, etc.)
What happened? You'd think the resulting half-breeds (us modern whites) would be less smart than blacks due to breeding with the stupid neanderthals.
Or, maybe your presumption that the Neanderthals were stupid is false. Though I suppose it could've been that all the bright black ancestors left Africa at the time (albeit, unlikely).
What's-likely-to-get-me-labeled-racist aside, I'd thought it was fairly well known that Neanderthals had larger brain capacity/skulls than us modern humans. I've attributed it to them actually being more intelligent, though likely lacking in some sort of physical fashion (high protein requirements, enjoyed fucking too much, lazy, physically slow, too peaceful, lacked motivation, whatever).
You get about 41mpg per US gallon, then, it looks like. Here I was thinking there was a drastic difference between your vehicles and our's, for a moment. :)
No, it wouldn't. Steel is the best material. The problem is materials and engineering.
Dents, dings, road impact, and yes, accidents will kill most vehicles before the engine goes kaput. Shocks, struts, etc. are/were engineered for certain use thresholds, which coincidentally tend to fail right around the same time. (The alternative is a much simpler, or much more expensive vehicle. I'd be OK with either, if it meant they actually lasted.)
This seems less true for vehicles made in the 80s, prior to the major change in manufacturing approaches in the automotive industry. Say what you will about independent frames (where the body sits on the vehicle frame) regarding occupant accident survival rates, but with the current lot of vehicles (where the frame is integral to the body), it takes only the smallest of fender bender to twist the frame and otherwise cause the vehicle to be a write-off. I've seen multiple newer 'safe' vehicles (both large and small) absolutely totaled (ie not drivable, not repairable) from the smallest of accidents, where an independent frame would've saved the vehicle and still not harmed the person(s) involved. (It's no wonder comprehensive automotive insurance costs so much these days.) You can get an 80s vehicle almost completely rebuilt for what it'd cost to straighten the frame and do minor 'body' repairs to a modern car. No thanks.
Oh yeah, due to the fact that the frame isn't the body, these older designs are more resilient to rust. The important parts are thicker and sturdier, instead of distributed throughout the body. Result? Rust-out won't make your vehicle unsafe except in the more extreme scenarios.
This problem is not just present in these two domains. You see this dichotomy elsewhere, specifically in IT.
I do IT in a scientific research-oriented organization, having taken over for previous staff members who were very much of the "IT should be done like research" school of thought. The result was that each problem was addressed quickly and without any consideration for the whole. Being as they were working with physical assets and not just software (though there was a lot of that, too), the end result is similar to a large, monolithic application with plenty of places where it can break, being almost completely unmaintainable in its current incarnation without a complete overhaul.
I consider them to sysadmin like programmers. From my experience with the programmers I've worked with (people who are self-ascribed programmers, both good and bad at their job), the quick fix or solution is the most desired result. Documentation? What's that? Don't do something elegant and atomic, looking at the larger picture: kludge it to work with what's there currently pull from misc. other things you're aware of, etc. since you built the original and are aware of its intricacies. (Again, by no means document these inter-relationships, why they're important, and what something disappearing might do somewhere else. Don't use common topology/framework practices for your designs/implementations, just make a giant fucking spider web. Don't, by any means, be consistent. "Ship it, it's done".)
I've seen the same thing in IT as a whole. There are entirely too many 'administrators' who are basically glorified technicians who make well above their performance grade. They are negligent in their responsibilities to plan roll-outs. No, a "complete rebuild and reorganization, trash the original' is no more a viable option in most cases than "a complete rewrite" is due to the time (and money) it'd take to do so.
out of curiosity, how many miles do you drive daily to get to work?
I live 'close' to work over here in the us. sanfrancisco area along a Bart line, which supposedly is good public transit. short of cycling a very steep hill to get to work, taking Bart and a bus (and taking an extra hour or two both ways) I'm stuck driving.
that's a a couple hundred a month in fuel. not cheap. (your fuel would be cheaper still if you weren't paying more in tax than for fuel. I'm not sure why cheap fuel is seen as a bad thing. its not green? fuck that. its a sign of affluence and economic potential.
my understanding of the soot is that its caused by an incorrect air/fuel mix. except at start I don't have that problem in my old non-turbo 6.2 Detroit engine.
another downside of modern diesels is that the engine will outlive the vehicle by a substantial margin. 200k is nothing for a diesel. gas engines start to give up the ghost before that.
at this point, fuel cost and availability are going to hold back serious adoption. ignoring how much cleaner even old diesel vehicles are than gas (due to fuel lifecycle pollution and ecological impact), uls diesel and the like now costs more than gas by quite a bit. diesel torque with marginally better MPG isn't going to make that all that appealing to most.
10 hours is a "long format" game? Seriously?
I'm sorry, but the kind of game I enjoy starts at 10 hours. KotOR and derivatives, Max Payne (which is actually more of a 5 hour game, and on the short side, but it made up for it by being awesome), Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Warcraft 2... the list goes on. Short story games are a huge disappointment if there's any story to speak of at all. You haven't got the time to develop anything meaningful.
What's next, NYT bestseller's list having Peanuts and Garfield?
Personally, I'm going to pick up these two OP games. I've not heard of them (kinda too busy to pay much attention) and I'm tired of crap games. Hell, even Deus Ex 3, which claims to hail back to the original, has been "consoled", and looks like it's going to suck on the "depth of story" department.
Except the Bay Area is also the most socially liberal and philanthropic regions of the country.
What?
Socially liberal, I get. I have met very, very few non-religious 'social liberals' who are philanthropic, unless we're talking about "I support taking money from the public coffers and giving it to others".
But that's largely besides the point. The Bay Area, like almost no other part of the US, is incredibly myopically focused. The Bay, one of the richest regions of the world, is the center of the world. All that sits outside its cultural realm are where the barbarians live. As someone who has lived throughout the US, nowhere have I found such a high majority of natives who are ignorant of "elsewhere", despite so many being implants from other parts of the country and world. (As a newcomer, it's somewhat odd to be looked at with disbelief and/or disdain when you're not aware of where a specific local landmark or roadway is. You'd not get that in BFE, Nebraska.)
As for "helping people out of their hardship"... I don't see how the farmer in Iowa who's lost his crops due to flooding is going to be helped by a tech boom, other than the welfare check that pays for him to not work after he's lost his farm (or pays him to not work the land, once it recovers, by overpaying him). I don't see how the tech worker in New York or Georgia benefits by some asshole deciding "we'll make more profit by sending this work to India" (ultimately assisting in the company's demise, thankfully). That's what we term a short term gain. It hurts everyone, long term.
A while back I had the idea that a sequel with Campbell would be pretty cool if they did it as him being "happy, married, etc." in a middle-class neighborhood and having the undead come to our Earth. You'd have a lot of opportunity for more complex satirical humour.
I doubt they'll do that, but it'd be fucking awesome.
Wow, that scenario is surprisingly similar to an environment I got out of a couple months ago, except about half the servers were virtual hosts, running multiple server instances, and I had to contend with a great deal of boss "hey, I know you're busy, but spend 20 minutes looking at this little problem for me because i can't figure it out" (which was ultimately 1-2 hours a day).
Except, I asked for management to keep their word from my initial hiring and to meet my initial pay requirements. Instead, I got a 2% increase and what amounted to "you're lucky you're getting any at all, here are the projects you're not getting done, and this is what we need done by the end of a month".
So I gave myself walking orders, but not before a large degree of employer hostility for said fact. They still haven't hired a replacement, and I know their remaining competent, non-neurotic asset is thinking of walking as well, soon to leave them as a shell support and marketing company. I'm making three times as much now, with substantially better benefits and a better boss (I'm making the calls), getting things done, and generally enjoying myself.
Don't sell yourself short in those situations. If you're good and know it, and getting stepped on, get out.
That's great, and mostly true in most instances, except for this: your elimination results in the failure (or absence) of a single point of failure.
Sure, in some organizations, you may be able to hide the fact your key IT is gone for a while. But from what I've seen, those "single points of failure" are IT types who's failure is largely that they're trying to head off a REALLY REALLY BIG failure, and sacrificing day-in-day-out type "administration" tasks. Most organizations are going to start suffering immediately from such a failure, so your value is fairly high in simply a "able to get shit done, or show it's being worked on".
No reasonable sane "IT Manager" is going to fire their sole source of resolution (which would make them look bad one way or another) without someone waiting in the wings. If you're paying attention (job postings, headhunters, etc.) you'll see this coming.
Good fucking luck.
Chances are, most functional organizations under 400 hundred people have only one or MAYBE two people who can effectively troubleshoot a bad outage. Sure, they may have an IT staff of 3, 4, 5, 10... but chances are, they're not of the 'sysadmin' type. They're frontline support, most likely, and deal mostly with Windows workstations and servers. For any crucial role, there is no more than one capable person on hand in most IT organizations. The pay masters wouldn't hear of duplicated functionality (that's inefficient!).
After all, if something in IT breaks, the worst management sees that can happen (unlike a dead body from neglegence/overworking your staff) is for there to be a fired employee. They don't see the big picture.
Sure, it's nice to feel needed. It's job security. But it's better to be needed and have someone else who can help pull the weight while you're sitting on a beach with a drink in hand, live a little longer, and have your resume ready to go. Being unemployed for a long period of time isn't half as bad as month after month of high-stress environments where you're pressed with "fix it now under pressure" or "I'm completely burnt out and can't maintain this level of service".
The big things of interest for OS X to me, as someone who likes efficiency and stability out of his systems, are:
* will they finally fix the horrible threading and context switching implementation so that running something like a spreadsheet program with a large spreadsheet not cause the gnashing of teeth? (This has been a problem since the beginning of 10.x, but I started notcing it around 10.4 with the Intel macs and able to compare apples to apples - ie linux or Windows on the same hardware).
* HFS+ replacement so IO won't be a horrendous bottleneck?
* Better wifi implementation so that the macs I've got to deal with are not the main ones to have signal issues? (Seriously, when macs have more issues with APs than XP, you know you've got issue. You can't completely say it's the hardware, because Linux on the same systems is at least better...)
* will they allow me to do what I want with the 'dock' and the sparse UI elements, or am I restricted to using it how they say I should (particularly as it pertains to multitasking/not multitasking: it doesn't matter if they make that not suck at the techincal level if the UI is still horribly crippled).
I think the internships most people get probably suck. They aren't like what you experienced, working for free. That's something else. What we're largely talking about are internships where people aren't paid, and in addition to that, are likely one of many differently skilled people doing menial grunt labor jobs not that different than the relatively skilled people working at similar jobs in places like India.
Granted, completely unpaid internships push the bar of sanity even further than simply a low-pay internship of this nature.
I will have to agree with you on the merit of no-pay work, though. I've done it, and while I didn't reap the benefits you did, it did provide me with experience. In the grand scheme of things, I'd argue that low-pay work (eg. minimum wage or close to it) is probably not all that far off the mark, though it at least demonstrates that the employer has an interest in your time as a quantifiable entity and not just free labor. (Unpaid IT internships are borderline insane, IMO. If you're in IT, don't fall for it - there's more than enough paid internship (or similar) work out there that you shouldn't have such a problem.)
Personally, the interns I've got are invaluable and it will likely result in at least one permanent job offer down the line. Someone I'd consider a good friend at this point was initially hired as an intern, and it resulted in a permanent position for him as well (he is now working very closely with me in a quasi-management and planning capacity). Starting as an intern, for the right company, at the right time, can be very valuable to everyone involved. (It just isn't that common.)
Probably for the same reason that "random guys" get shit posted to slashdot all the time?
Historically, most of the cool shit on slashdot, as well as the not-cool-but-socially-pertinent stuff, has been 'small fry' stuff. It's why the so-called Slashdot Effect is pertinent in the first place. If something isn't relatively obscure, then it really doesn't belong on a site that's "news for nerds" does it?
Would you rather have nothing but John Dvorak and pcmag.com type posts, like every other link aggregator out there? IMO, bring on the random 'blog' posts. I'm tired of monotony on the Internet.
Can you say "slashvertisement"? I think this is the most blatant ad I've seen on slashdot since forever.